Last month, a transgender-identifying man murdered two children and injured several others at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis. The attack reignited a conversation the left desperately wants to avoid: the growing trend of violence among transgender-identifying individuals. Now, the Department of Justice is reportedly weighing a ban on gun purchases for people suffering from gender dysphoria. Some Second Amendment advocates are sounding the alarm, but they’re missing the point about what this ban would really be about.
According to a DOJ source, officials are exploring "ways to ensure that mentally ill individuals suffering from gender dysphoria are unable to obtain firearms while they are unstable and unwell." The source described this potential policy as "pretty common sense," noting that "Democrats have called for common sense gun laws for a long time."
From where I sit, this has nothing to do with guns and everything to do with forcing America to confront an uncomfortable truth about gender dysphoria. This isn't really a Second Amendment story—it's a story about the Trump administration's determination to restore sanity to our understanding of mental health.
Here’s why: federal law already has robust mechanisms to prevent mentally ill individuals from purchasing firearms.
Form 4473, which every gun buyer must complete when purchasing from a federally licensed dealer, explicitly asks whether the buyer has "ever been adjudicated as a mental defective OR have you ever been committed to a mental institution." Anyone who has been "formally committed to a mental institution by court, board, commission or other lawful authority" involuntarily for "mental defectiveness or mental illness" or "drug use" faces an automatic firearms prohibition.
ICYMI: The FBI Corruption Scandal Just Got a Whole Lot Worse
So why would the Trump administration need new restrictions if these safeguards are already in place? The answer is, they don’t. What the administration appears to be doing is moving to classify gender dysphoria itself as a mental disorder—and possibly treating transition-related drugs as disqualifying under existing drug-use prohibitions. In other words, the goal isn’t to create a new category of restriction, but to apply the rules already on the books to transgender-identifying individuals.
I hope that’s the plan, anyway.
This represents a direct challenge to the left's most sacred ideological victories in recent years. Medical organizations have long classified gender dysphoria as a mental disorder. But in recent years, they've gone woke, abandoning their responsibility to treat gender dysphoria as a problem requiring intervention and instead embracing an "affirmation" model that celebrates and encourages these disorders.
This shift wasn't based on new scientific discoveries or breakthrough research. It was purely ideological—driven by activists who bullied medical professionals into abandoning their clinical judgment in favor of politically correct groupthink. The American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, and countless other medical bodies essentially threw decades of established practice out the window to appease transgender activists.
The coming battle isn’t really about guns at all. It will be about whether America allows political correctness to continue overriding medical science and common sense. The radical left will mobilize every resource to oppose this course correction because they understand the broader implications. Once gender dysphoria treated as a mental disorder again, their entire house of cards collapses.
